Corona Renderer 1.2 for 3ds Max – released

Here we go again. Corona Renderer version 1.2 for 3ds Max is being served piping hot!
This is our fastest delivery of the new version so far – it took us just 43 days from the release date of version 1.1. As we stated before, we prefer this strategy of releasing multiple smaller updates, so you always have the chance to use our latest tech. Hopefully everything will run smoothly 🙂

Quick Facts

Corona Render 1.2 is freely available to all our customers on FairSaaS (monthly, yearly), Box with Subscription and Educational/Student license.

Supports Autodesk 3ds Max versions 2011-2016.

Company News

We have updated ourCorona Renderer for 3ds Max Development roadmap– as you can see, we have shifted MacOS/Linux port to version 1.4 and we will instead release another small update with additional improvements as version 1.3. Why this change? We still have more small, but very important and useful features we want to release as soon as possible. And to be honest, our team needs a bit of rest and most of the guys will take holidays. Ondrej, Adam and Jaroslav will also visit Siggraph which will eat a considerable amount of time from the schedule.

We are still working on alternative payment options – unfortunately this task takes a considerably greater amount of time and co-operation of many parties than expected, but it will be doable. On the other hand our Reseller program is progressing rapidly and we will soon take some resellers on board.

We were also discussing the future of Corona Renderer a lot, including side projects (which will benefit Corona users) and some positive changes in pricing and licensing policies. We just need a bit of time to implement the changes for the greater good of everyone. And we will certainly need more people to execute them.

This brings me to recruiting . We are still looking for reinforcements to our development team – especially light transporters, researchers and plugin developers. We have conducted a couple of interviews already and we will do couple more of them in near future. Below on the picture you can see almost the whole team from our Prague office (with some of our research guys missing).

New Features/Improvements

Ludvik has prepared a nice short video summarizing all the new features and improvements included in version 1.2.

Displacement Improvements

Corona Renderer v1.2 brings you a completely re-worked displacement which should be much more powerful, stable and less memory-hungry. The new algorithm also creates nicer meshes with less meshing artifacts. We are also planning further displacement enhancements in 1.3 as well.

Keep Edges Together

I am very happy that we can introduce the new “Keep Edges Together” functionality for displacement which many of you requested .

Corona Displacement Modifier

Displacement is now also available as a modifier – CoronaDisplacementMod

Displacement – Adaptivity

Displacement is now adaptive, which means that it does not “waste” polygons on places where it is not necessary. That results in less memory consumption.
There is one little drawback possible with new displacement – pre-computation phase can be a bit longer for some more complex scenes. But we will work on that.

CoronaBitmap improvements

As we have promised in our last release blogpost, we have continued improving CoronaBitmap. Some of the improvements/bugfixes are listed below.

Cropping visually in a popup window is now supported

Compressed TGA supported

Faster sampling of opacity maps

Fixed incorrect blurring of stretched textures

Fixed CoronaBitmap working incorrectly with CoronaScatter

Smaller Improvements

Added Support of 3ds Max Atmospheric effects

CoronaScatter supports VertexPaint

Corona Multimap Texmap Improvement

List of various improvements:

3ds Max 2016 Physical Camera is now supported

“Area to Render: Selected” is now supported

Added support for 3ds Max atmospheric effects

Added seed spinner to MultiMap

The standalone (simple) Corona Sun has been reworked. It is now targeted and displays proper illumination in the viewport

Textures in CoronaScatter now support vertex color as well as other extra mapping channels

MultiMap now has 100 maximum slots (some of them are accessible only via maxscript)

New improved proxy exporter script

Added “override enviro distance” option to z-depth render element

Added “override enviro color” option to CTexmap render element

UI changes

Implemented checkbox “Override EV” for CameraMod

Only active MultiMap submaps are now displayed in slate (based on number of submaps)

OK I will, but funny is that I didnt even know there is displacement working on this scene. Maybe some materials converted from vray in corona proxies? Need to check it out. Anyway I swich down to previous version so far.

After installing 1.2, the scripts should be available in the bottom of the quad menu after right-clicking anywhere in viewport. In 1.2 the scripts are in /scripts/coronarenderer, if you install Corona 1.1 again, your scripts will be installed directly in scripts folder, but you won’t be able to access them via quad menu

They had to change the sun because with it was not possible to properly display the illumination in the viewport. You can still have control over the rotation of the sun with numeric spinners. Check the forum https://goo.gl/LBc0ud

You Corona guys absolutely rock!
while I was on vacation you made V1.2 of this brilliant render. With volume fog and great displacement approvements.
You revive god ol 3dsMax, keep up the good work.
I will run my FairSaaS for ever!

I think this version seems more unstable and I think it’s related to displacement. A big archviz scene I was working on before now crashes regularly (max just quits to desktop, no option to save recovery version) and it appears to always happen at the displacement stage. That’s with it just set to 10px which isn’t even enough to see detail properly.

Also, if I set the displacement to 1 or 2 px so I can actually see the detail, it takes absolutely ages to compute that stage. Like 15 mins. and can’t be interrupted.

HI, I recently downloaded Corona Free trial . While following a tutorial i noticed that the angle rotation degree for CoronaSun is missing. Its my first time using Corona so i do not know what to do. Kindly let me know if there is something i am missing or there is an issue with the program ?.